{"id":106053,"date":"2016-12-21T17:36:52","date_gmt":"2016-12-21T22:36:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=106053"},"modified":"2016-12-22T11:23:27","modified_gmt":"2016-12-22T16:23:27","slug":"our-contributors-pick-their-favorite-books-of-the-year-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/21\/our-contributors-pick-their-favorite-books-of-the-year-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Contributors Pick Their Favorite Books of the Year"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

From Society of the Spectacle<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

This was a year of path-breaking books of poems\u2014the taut intensity of Ishion Hutchinson\u2019s\u00a0House of Lords and Commons<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0the striking diction and bitter tenderness of Monica Youn\u2019s\u00a0Blackacre<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0It was also a year of culminating ones\u2014John Koethe\u2019s wise, prescient\u00a0The Swimmer<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>and John Kinsella\u2019s\u00a0Drowning in Wheat<\/em><\/a>, which gathers thirty years of his work. Peter Wohlleben\u2019s\u00a0The Hidden Life of Trees<\/em><\/a> jolted my sense of the forest and the trees\u2014and parts and wholes everywhere. Finally, Michael McCarthy\u2019s\u00a0The Moth Snowstorm<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0a meditation on species plenitude and extinction, sent me back to Audubon on passenger pigeons, \u201cobscuring the light of\u00a0noon\u00a0as by an eclipse.\u201d Chased by a single hawk, \u201cthey darted forward in undulating and angular lines, descended and swept close over the earth with inconceivable velocity, mounted perpendicularly so as to resemble a vast column, and, when high, were seen wheeling and twisting within their continued lines, which then resembled the coils of a gigantic serpent.\u201d \u2014Susan Stewart<\/strong> (\u201cChannel<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n

Some stories are simply\u00a0imagined. Others are birthed. Jacqueline Woodson\u2019s novel\u00a0Another Brooklyn<\/a><\/em>\u00a0has been birthed from\u00a0fragments of memory of what it feels like to grow up \u201cGirl<\/em>,\u201d not just in Brooklyn, not just in brown skin, but in bodies that betray us and make us vulnerable, even as we are young and magical, powerful and fierce. Set against a backdrop of loss, death, war, and the constant threat of physical violence\u2014for these things will\u00a0always be\u00a0the background music to becoming a woman\u2014this book is both heartbreaking and beautiful, and it is especially meaningful and necessary\u00a0in today\u2019s current\u00a0climate.\u00a0I wish every woman would\u00a0read this book: the young women who have\u00a0just embarked upon\u00a0their\u00a0pilgrimage of becoming unapologetically themselves, and the older women who may\u00a0have forgotten they were ever searching. \u2014Christine Lincoln<\/strong>\u00a0(\u201cWhat\u2019s Necessary to Remember When Telling a Story<\/a>\u201d) \u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t write through shame,\u201d David Means once said to Jonathan Franzen. \u201cYou write around it.\u201d I thought of that wise dictum many times as I read David Szalay\u2019s All That Man Is<\/em><\/a>, a sequence of nine short stories about European males. (Szalay prefers to call the book a novel, rather than a collection, because it has an overarching structure: the first protagonist is a teenager, the second is in his early twenties, the third in his late twenties and so on into old age.) In a number of the tales, Szalay shyly orbits the experience of shame, as Means advises. A fallen Russian oligarch contemplates the sale of his yacht; an English scholar of medieval humanities contemplates his girlfriend\u2019s unplanned pregnancy; a Scottish businessman reduced to impoverished retirement in Croatia tries to seduce a desperate middle-aged woman. However, two of the best sections are about shamelessness. The protagonist of \u201cYouth\u201d lives for carnal satisfaction; the protagonist of \u201cLascia Amor e siegui Marte\u201d lives for his brutal work as a tabloid reporter. Neither of them seem capable of reining in his basest impulses, and neither of them seems to feel bad about it. Szalay refuses to punish their depravity, an awesome act of authorial self-restraint. \u2014Benjamin Nugent<\/strong> (\u201cThe Treasurer<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n

I am not sure if Mugwort-born<\/a><\/em>, the memoir of the Tibetan Buddhist lama Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche counts, because although it may be published as a physical book one day, it is being released sporadically on the Web. Most new books I read are either overwritten, with fortress-like prose, or loosely, as though the writer could barely stand to sit in a bar and jot something down in a notebook and later type it into his laptop wearing headphones. Both qualities seem like a weakness to me. Khyentse Rinpoche\u2019s voice is unique because it is not like either. In short episodes, Rinpoche describes his life, not from beginning to end but according to the subject of the moment: tears, hidden lands<\/a>, phalluses<\/a>, the memory of a French lady\u2019s perfumed cream. In sane, gentle language, Rinpoche describes his life, and some very strange things that I am sure many readers of this site cannot believe. I recommend it thoroughly. \u2014Amie Barrodale<\/strong> (\u201cProtectors<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From \u201cEpisode Four: Hidden Lands,\u201d by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche.<\/p><\/div>\n

I reread Guy Debord\u2019s 1962\u00a0Society of the Spectacle<\/em><\/a>\u00a0last summer\u2014spilled Diet Coke on it in Woodstock. It\u2019s still the most novel and comprehensive critique of ideology\u2014only the passages on religion and workers\u2019 councils have dated. It has almost nothing to do with the phenomena of mass media, which Debord saw as merely the most superficial manifestation of the spectacle, and is thus far more materialist than Adorno and Horkheimer\u2019s famous indictment of the culture industry. Among its many other virtues, Debord\u2019s notion of the spectacle explains how and why Obama and Clinton and Trump and Sanders are on the same team. Debord\u2019s claim that the \u201centire expanse of society\u201d is nothing but the \u201cportrait\u201d of capital should resonate now more than ever; that it does not\u2014that soi-disant oppositional forces spend themselves in arguing for the portrait\u2019s restoration\u2014bespeaks the spectacle\u2019s power. \u2014Michael Robbins<\/strong> (\u201cWalkman<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n

One of the most exciting books of the year is\u00a0Thief in the Interior<\/em><\/a>\u00a0by Phillip B. Williams, published by Alice James Books. I\u2019ve been a fan of his poetry for years now, and as I expected, his debut collection left me bereft and transformed. Williams writes about the violence that has been inflicted upon black people in the United States, the brutality of poverty, and the ways in which our contemporary media has sensationalized and eroticized the spiritual and physical desecration of human beings. But despite the cruelty and suffering interrogated in these poems, there is still a sense of hope and transcendence, because the work is also about love, the sacredness of flesh, and the strategies for survival. \u2014Erika L. S\u00e1nchez<\/strong> (\u201cLove Story<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To close off 2016, we\u2019ve asked a few of our contributors to recommend their favorite books of the year. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26379],"tags":[4033,26381,2563,26380,13422,22787,26064,26384,26391,24349,10234,26392,26382,18321,26389,26383,18322,26387,21562,12293,26390,26385,26394,26393,12290,26386,26388,26395],"class_list":["post-106053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2016","tag-the-swimmer","tag-all-that-man-is","tag-amie-barrodale","tag-another-brooklyn","tag-benjamin-nugent","tag-blackacre","tag-christine-lincoln","tag-drowning-in-wheat","tag-dzongsar-khyentse-rinpoche","tag-erika-l-sanchez","tag-guy-debord","tag-hidden-lands","tag-house-of-lords-and-commons","tag-ishion-hutchinson","tag-jacqueline-woodson","tag-john-kinsella","tag-john-koethe","tag-michael-mccarthy","tag-michael-robbins","tag-monica-youn","tag-mugwort-born","tag-peter-wohlleben","tag-phillip-b-williams","tag-society-of-the-spectacle","tag-susan-stewart","tag-the-hidden-life-of-trees","tag-the-moth-snowstorm","tag-thief-in-the-interior"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOur 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